It’s a bit rich to watch the bipartisan backlash to President Trump’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria. Members of Congress from both parties have blasted the president for scaling back U.S. military involvement, even though they never authorized any involvement in the first place.
Still, there’s no disputing the fact that the situation in Syria is rapidly deteriorating. A week after Turkish warplanes started strafing Kurdish targets along the Syria-Turkey border, the situation on the ground has only become more disastrous. Hundreds of people have been killed, chaos has displaced nearly 150,000 others, Turkish proxies have committed grisly executions, and hundreds of Islamic State detainees and relatives have reportedly used the violence to escape captivity.
Amid the chaos, Republicans and Democrats in Washington still don’t understand why Trump made the decision to pull U.S. forces from the area. Yes, it’s true that this withdrawal made a Turkish military incursion into Kurdish-controlled northern Syria a smoother proposition. But these same hawkish lawmakers refuse to explain how keeping our soldiers in place would have accomplished anything — other than keeping Americans in harm’s way, that is.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration recognizes it has a political problem on its hands.
This is one reason why the president authorized far-ranging sanctions on the Turkish economy if Turkish forces commit indiscriminate violence against the Kurdish population. Meanwhile, members of Congress are writing a variety of sanctions bills, including one from Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen that would prohibit weapons sales to Turkey and sanction any third party who transacts with the Turkish military.
The most significant response, however, may come from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who during a press conference last weekend previewed a resolution that would condemn Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northeastern Syria.
“We will be putting on the floor of the Senate and the House … a joint resolution that urges the president to undo his decision to do everything he can to protect the Kurds, to do everything that we must do to prevent ISIS terrorists from escaping, and make sure that Turkey respects existing agreements related to Syria and with the United States,” the New York Democrat told the media. “I’m going to work so hard to pass this resolution, this joint resolution, this bipartisan resolution to try and get the president to undo what he has done.”
At first glance, this sounds like a noble initiative, and the Senate certainly has a legislative prerogative to have its collective voice heard. But this is the same institution that hasn’t even authorized U.S. military force in Syria to begin with.
It seems like a million years ago, but when the U.S. began its counter-Islamic State campaign in the summer of 2014, the Obama administration launched the operation unilaterally, without as much as a roll call vote on Capitol Hill. Congress was simply left watching from the bleachers as U.S. fighter pilots dropped bombs on ISIS positions across Iraq and Syria. With the rare exception of a few constitutionalists such as Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, lawmakers were perfectly fine with the operation going forward without a debate and a vote, even though that’s what the Constitution requires.
There is a very solid case to be made that U.S. operations in Syria over the last five years have in fact been unconstitutional, for the simple reason that Congress has never authorized those operations in the first place.
Lawyers in the executive branch will strenuously disagree with this legal reasoning, of course. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have strongly contended that because ISIS is an outgrowth of the old al Qaeda in Iraq, the White House already possessed all the authority it needed to strike Syria thanks to previous authorizations. For lawmakers who have shriveled in fright from taking any votes on war and peace over the last two decades, this offered a convenient excuse to sit back and do nothing.
Yet as it turns out, members of Congress on both sides of the political aisle don’t register that same fear when the subject up for discussion is a bill that seeks to prevent withdrawals. When Trump made his intentions of leaving Syria clear last December, senators scrambled within weeks to pass a nonbinding resolution opposing what it termed a “precipitous” departure of troops from the country. And now, if Schumer’s new plan ever comes to a vote on the Senate floor, it’s likely to garner a similar level of support.
If only Congress felt as much urgency in sending American soldiers into a war zone as it does in railing against their exit.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
